As the Dixie Chicks prepared to kick off the U.S. leg of their Lipton Presents the Dixie Chicks Top of the World Tour Thursday night, the tea brand has bagged a big summer promotion using the group and tied to the tour, say people familiar with the deal.

The brand will remain the title sponsor for the 60-city tour and plans to have product giveaways at the shows. But a sweepstakes linked to the Chicks is canceled, and the sweepstakes instead will offer a VIP package to the Country Music Awards in Nashville in November, these people say.

Unilever, which owns the Lipton brand, and Pepsi, which markets Lipton tea drinks, jointly announced the concert sponsorship and sweepstakes with much fanfare in February.

But that was before Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines stirred up a backlash by telling a London concert audience on March 10 that she was against the Iraq war and was "ashamed" that President Bush hailed from her native Texas.

Neither company would comment.

The combination of country music and iced tea should have made for a sweet promotion. The South and Southwest, where the trio is especially popular, are also the best U.S. markets for iced tea.

But Maines' comments left a sour taste with fans, who responded with protests that included crushing and burning their CDs. Some radio stations refused to play Dixie Chicks songs. Before the kickoff concert on Thursday in Greenville, S.C., a local radio station was outside the arena offering to swap the non-refundable Dixie Chicks tickets for tickets to a station-sponsored veteran fundraiser.

The Lipton national sweepstakes would have put the Dixie Chicks' images on packages of Lipton tea bags and mixes and on bottles of Lipton Iced Tea starting later this month. Prizes included a VIP concert event with the Dixie Chicks, as well as CDS, Chicks tour jackets and T-shirts. A Lipton Iced Tea TV ad starring the Dixie Chicks and scheduled to run in mid-May to promote the contest is also likely to be dropped, say people with knowledge of the situation.

The quiet, but quick, cancellation shows how nervous marketers are about outspoken celebrities.

"It's one thing to align your brand with things you can totally control," says Neil Johnston, partner at branding firm Lippincott Mercer. "When you have a real person who can actually speak for themselves ... the risk is obviously much higher. They're living, breathing, human beings who have voices, and unfortunately, they sometimes say the wrong things."

The deal may have had bad karma from the start. The Lipton Iced Tea TV ad, which appears to show fans at a Chicks concert, was staged at Spahn Movie Ranch, the film lot where murderer Charles Manson allegedly formed his "family" of followers. A source at the ad agency involved says a Native American shaman performed a prayer ritual before the shoot.